Twitter Cards & SEO

Twitter cards will help your Tweets stand out and turn a boring Tweet with no image in to a more appealing version of the same Tweet automatically. The SEO benefits should be obvious, but I will explain that further on in this post, keep reading. So what are these magical Twitter Cards? Twitter defines them like this: “With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experience to Tweets that drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your web page, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.” Here is an example of a Twitter Card: As you can see, it is a simple Tweet with a link in it. The add media function on Twitter was not used! The link in the Tweet automatically sources that content directly from your website if you have the code set up correctly. Here is an even more detailed explanation of the various methods Twitter provides for automatically displaying your content on Twitter every time you or someone else posts a link to one of the pages of your blog or website. “The below Card types have a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter’s web and mobile clients:

So you may be asking yourself, what does this all have to do with SEO? “Patience, young grasshopper.” The SEO factor works like this, if you are producing great content on your blog and want folks to read your posts, you may want to include a link to your blog like this one https://digitalmarketingbc.com/digitalmarketingbc/ that includes what may possibly be the keyword phrase you are aspiring to rank for on Google and it can’t hurt to make it coincide with the title of the blog post or page. In the example provided, “Digital Marketing BC” is the obvious target you would be aiming for in the SERP’s and by posting that link on Twitter using Twitter Cards, you will not only be increasing engagement rates on your Tweet bringing in more traffic to your website through that link, if your image is cool and your content too, many other Twitter users will re-tweet your content! If your content is excellent, other bloggers or website owners may grab that link and post it on their blogs and you can see how that will benefit your post and website as a whole, by having that keyword rich link pointing back at you. Was that a hint? Anyway.. Now you may be wondering, how can I get that Twitter code on my website?! Well, if you use WordPress, you can have Twitter Cards set up in under 3 minutes. All you need to do is download this pluginhttps://wordpress.org/plugins/add-meta-tags/ and install it on your self hosted WordPress website. Once it is installed go to Settings in your WordPress Administration menu and click on Metadata. Once the plugin settings page opens look for the following: Yep you guessed it, it’s that easy! Check those boxes and click save and you are done. Now you and anyone who posts a link to your website on Twitter can enjoy the automatic benefit of having a more attractive Tweet to display that will increase engagement and create greater awareness for your website. If you don’t use WordPress, don’t stress out about it, just visit these links where Twitter provides you with a detailed explanation on how to get the ball rolling and manually insert the codes: Links on Twitter: Summary Card – Summary Card with Large Image – App Card – Player Card